Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination

Faced with the challenge of building a moral, social, and political movement to abolish slavery, many 19^th-century American writers conjured up the long dead souls of 17^th-century Puritans. Kenyon Gradert’s Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination catalogues this phenomenon across a wide variety of texts, and claims that its revolutionary character has been underappreciated. Gradert’s study is not focused on Puritan influence on 19^th-century American abolitionism, but rather the usefulness of invoking an imagined Puritan genealogy for abolitionist rhetoric. While American abolitionists were far removed from the theology of the Puritans, nonconformist Protestant Christians were looked to as empowering examples of heroic spiritual fervor to transform society.

The book’s approach is interdisciplinary, but it is best characterized as part of a conversation within early American literary scholarship about “postexceptionalist Puritans,” which has also been called “the new Puritan studies.” The chief concern of this subfield is summarized by Gradert’s observation that “a polemical reaction to . . . Puritan studies has made suspicion a dominant mood for the last thirty years” (6). This suspicion of the Puritans, which is the result of the prominence they have been assigned in American origin stories by figures like Perry Miller and Sacvan Bercovitch, has obscured, according to Gradert, their “usefulness within a rebellious abolitionist imagination” (10). By decoupling Puritans from narratives of American origins and, indeed, from historical Puritanism itself, Gradert seeks to open up new perspectives on abolitionist literary production and the way it was shaped by religious memory.

In the book’s opening chapter, Gradert lays the foundation for his subsequent analysis by examining how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips used Puritanism—or the broader Protestant tradition—as a shorthand for radical opposition to the national status quo regarding enslavement. This template of Puritanism as a form of heroic religion, for example, was applied by all three writers to John Brown in the wake of his arrest after attempting to raid Harper’s Ferry. Gradert complicates this alignment of the heroic religion of the Puritans with masculinity in the following chapter, which explores how female abolitionists such as Maria Weston Chapman and Lydia Maria Child drew on rhetoric about the Puritans to legitimate their own antislavery activism. In another chapter focused on poetry, James Russell Lowell and John Greenleaf Whittier are examined as writers who found inspiration in Puritans—Milton above all—for their own poetic vocations, even if they became more ambivalent about the relationship between politics and poems over time. (Whittier’s Quakerism oddly receives little discussion in this chapter, and he is even referred to at one point as an “antislavery Puritan” [117]). Another chapter compares siblings Henry Ward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe in their attempt to develop a vision of la belle puritaine, a Puritanism less fixated on confrontation and more rooted in moderation and churches. Gradert saves perhaps the most compelling use of America’s Puritan mythology for his final chapter, which shows how Black writers such as Henry Highland Garnet resituated discourses about abolitionism’s Puritan genealogies in the context of the historical experience of enslavement. Unlike many of the white abolitionists covered in Puritan Spirits, Black writers and the newspapers in which they were published incisively pointed out the longstanding relationship between American slavery and American freedom, “neither fully embracing the Puritans as their own nor rejecting them, but using them as a rhetorical bridge between Anglo-American identity and African American activism, a strategic means of holding a dominant community accountable to its own better values” (161).

(1) Gradert analyzes an impressive range of abolitionist invocations of the Puritan legacy, but the motives and limitations of these appropriations are perhaps best seen in the chapter on William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator newspaper. During its weekly run from 1831 to 1865, the antislavery newspaper brought up the Puritans over a thousand times, or about every other issue (2). Adapting to the intensifying secular and capitalist public sphere of the 19^th century, publishers like Garrison situated their printing “squarely within a revolutionary Protestant print heritage” (76). As the abolitionist movement sought to position itself as the moral alternative to staid institutional churches, Puritans were admired for their iconoclastic, plainspeaking, and aggressive associations. “Garrison’s blend of prophecy, romanticism, and the Puritan past,” Gradert writes, “struck the right notes for Americans who struggled to reconcile the spiritual promise of their nation with the material complacency of its present” (89). The key word here is blend. For the Protestant heritage invoked by Garrison and his fellow abolitionists included not only Puritans, but figures such as John Wycliffe and Martin Luther (94-95). John Milton, Oliver Cromwell, and the English Revolution may have been reoccurring points of reference for abolitionists enamored with Puritanism’s confrontational, righteous style, but other Protestants seem to have been frequently mentioned as well.

(2) This raises the question of whether abolitionists were self-consciously referencing a Puritan legacy, or a broader Protestant one. It’s an issue Gradert is at times sensitive to: his first endnote, for example, clarifies that he uses the terms Puritans and Pilgrims interchangeably, as was the tendency in the 19^th century (187n1), and he often relies on broader phrasing such as “venerated nonconformist heritage” and “shared Protestant lineage” (17, 21). But given the framing of the argument as an analysis of how abolitionists used Puritan memory, the slippage between Puritanism and Protestantism might have been more fully discussed, especially due to its persistence throughout the study.

The abolitionist hope had been that “if reimagined in creative ways attuned to the spirit of the time, New England’s Puritan heritage might cease to be an aesthetic burden and instead become a powerful resource for a progressive democracy” (112). Gradert’s assessment of the success of this project is that “abolitionists’ imaginative battle lines forced clearer terms of debate,” even if the legacy of that debate, Civil War and Reconstruction, was complicated and far from ideal (179). By recovering the nonconformist Protestant texture of these “imaginative battle lines,” Gradert offers scholars significant material with which to evaluate the meaningfulness of “Puritans” in the imaginations of nineteenth-century Americans.

Jay David Miller is an assistant professor of English at George Fox University.

Jay David Miller

Date Of Review:

September 16, 2022